[andybp85]

I wonder if another major change was the rise of the web browser. Making websites do cool things was what really got me into it, after a couple minor forays into things like C++ when I was in grade/high school. Obviously programming for a virtual machine and the concepts in Javascript are nothing new, but having the execution environment and useful programming tools like Firebug a click away for anyone by default seems like it would've been a paradigm shift in piquing the curiosity of people who otherwise would've never thought twice about say what the jvm installed on their machine actually did.

This was before my time though, and I could be confusing correlation (explosion in pc/web usage) with causation.

(Also I'm kinda jealous of people who were programmers in the 80s, it sounds so cool lol.)

[wiz21c]

It was cool. First, most of us were kids, so we looked at computers as tools for expressing our youth, not just programming. Programmers were also not many and hacker culture was everywhere. Also, many of the famous programs/games by that time were done by one person, so as a young kid, you thought : "I can do it too". Then computers were new and their impact on our imagination was tremendous (now everybody has a computer and nobody cares). There was not much to help you to start, so (I don't want to sound elitist, it's not the point), ending up programming was acting like becoming a wiz kid (there were many stories of people who were coding assembly with opcodes using the computer on display at some shop 'cos they couldn't afford it). Then you had Wargames and Tron where the wiz kids were ruling the world. Moreover, EULA were not a thing, you were free to do what you wanted to.

So basically, for the teenagers, it was dreams, dreams, dreams. Not because of the technology, but because technology was so primitive.

Now, it's different: you have mindblowing technology all of the place, so you can build things like hell. But that came with the price of sophistication: only a handful understand sorting, databases, neural nets technologies... The lego boxes have become fatter.